When you have a home – based business, you rely heavily on your business equipment. Things like cell phones, cell phone service, computers, and internet service are essentials that you depend on every day to make working from home work for you. Over the past few days, my family has had a funny experience with business equipment that illustrates just how important reliable business equipment is.
Here is a little background information to set the stage for the story. My husband and I have been customers with the same wireless service provider for ten years. The service was so good that we do not even have a land line phone. We even added a mobile broadband device to our account when we bought our house three years ago and discovered that there were no other internet options available in our area unless we got a land line phone.
Over the past few months, my husband’s phone had been getting less and less functional, causing him more and more frustration. Our wireless service provider did not have the specific phone we wanted, but we found the ones we wanted at a store that is two hours away. The catch was, the phones were for a different wireless service provider.
Here’s where the fun begins. After trying unsuccessfully to reserve the phones by placing an online order, my husband called the store to make sure that the phones were there. They were, and he reserved them. With GPS in hand, he got in the car and drove two hours to the store – his journey even included taking a ferry across a lake. After spending an hour at the store getting the phones and trying to set them up, he got in the car and came home – again, taking the ferry across the lake.
We got the phones activated and the next day he left to go out of town for a business trip to a place he goes frequently. He did not call me until he arrived at his destination, but when he did call he was not very happy. Between our house and where he went was a three hour drive and he had not had any cell phone service for almost the entire way. We both use our phones for business, and we need reliable service in the places that we go. We decided to cancel our new cell phone service immediately and reactivate our old account with our previous provider. I even mailed him his old phone after reactivating it. We’ll get new phones next week, albeit a slightly different model than we wanted. For us, the reliability of our cell phone and internet service is essential to the operation of our businesses.
Photo by Alvimann on morguefile.com.